In my U.S. Pat. No. 3,711,182 issued on Jan 16, 1973 entitled GLARELESS MIRROR USING RELATIVELY ROTATABLE POLARIZERS there is shown and described in one embodiment a mirror arrangement which may be utilized as a cosmetic mirror. Essentially, this mirror includes a central circular flat mirror surrounded by an annular window through which light passes by means of curved fluorescent tubes or a plurality of individual incandescent lights disposed in an annular array behind the window. The flat central mirror is polarized in one direction and the window is polarized in another direction but in the embodiment disclosed is rotatable so as to vary the angle between the two polarizations.
With the foregoing arrangement, it is possible to highlight various areas of a subject's face as viewed in the flat mirror and also eliminate glare. The annular configuration for the illumination of the subject has the advantage of avoiding shadows.
While the above described mirror arrangement functions well, in the case of a cosmetic type application, certain improvements would be desirable. One such improvement would be the elimination of the necessity for curved fluorescent type lamps to provide the annular light array since such structures require a ballast and are relatively expensive. Moreover, it would be similarly desirable to avoid the use of a large number of small incandescent lights in an annular array. Not only would the unit then be less expensive to manufacture but in addition there would be avoided the problem of one or more of the lights burning out such probabilities increasing with an increase in the number of individual lights.
Finally, many conventional cosmetic mirrors have a flat mirror on a front surface and a concave mirror on the rear surface so that by simply turning the mirror over, the viewed image is magnified. It would be desirable to incorporate this particular feature in combination with the polarizing techniques described in my heretofore above mentioned U.S. patent.